Anti-Gender, Anti-University: “Gender Ideology” and the Future of US Higher Education

This article illustrates how the global movement against “gender ideology” informs rightwing attacks on university-based research and mainstream academic institutions in the United States. I take as my starting point the figure of Robert Oscar Lopez—a “pro-family” activist who participated in anti-gender mobilizations in Western Europe as a tenured professor at a California public university. In addition to publishing numerous online pieces about the dangers of marriage equality and “same-sex parent-ing,” he has written extensively about US higher education and the difficulties he faced as a Brown, Christian, conservative professor. Through an examination of Lopez’s essays on the university from 2012 (when he first spoke out against LGBT equality) to 2016 (when he resigned from his faculty position), I track the shifting contours of conservative hostility toward the academy amidst the resurgence of far-right populisms around the globe and the mainstreaming of ultraconservative ideas in US political culture. The first half of this article discusses the role counterknowledge production played in Lopez’s “pro-family” activism. Taking cues from anti-gender campaigns in Western Europe—and building on the American right’s ongoing efforts to produce “academicized” conservative expertise—Lopez sought to undermine marriage equality by debunking queer and feminist research and offering alternative perspectives on LGBT families. In the second half, I examine Lopez’s drift farther rightward. While his early writing imagined the possibility of a politicized conservative intellectual move-ment, his later essays abandoned this fantasy and, instead, derided college degrees as wastes of money and denounced publicly funded education. I pay careful attention to Lopez’s attempts to cast his anti-gender/anti-university position as advancing women’s rights, racial justice, and anti-colonial resistance. In the process, this article provides insight into how far-right racial, gender, and sexual politics scramble conventional distinctions between the left and the right.